Time Flies

Can't believe it's Rondy week already. One last training run Tuesday before the big race. Dogs are looking pretty good. Most are finally over being sick. We are really getting excited about the race. It will be fun to see how the dogs do.

So, this has been a tough month for us. We lost our beloved Fancy earlier this month. She was just shy of 16 years old. She had a great long life and will always be one of the greatest lead dogs to ever live at this kennel. Almost every dog here is related to her. Our best leaders right now are her pups. She will be dearly missed forever. We also lost another old guy, Fancy's son Spencer. He was my limited class leader for many, many years. We'll dedicate this Rondy race to them!

The draw is tomorrow night so we'll find out how many teams will be there for sure. Since it's our Rookie year we go out at the back of the pack-bummer....... Looking to just survive all 3 days, we don't really care how we place just want to finish the race. We'll try to update the blog but life gets pretty busy with work & dogs.

Another race weekend down

We went and raced at the ASDRA trails in Anchorage again this past weekend. I had higher hopes for my 6 dog team but after loosing my leader to an attack from another dog team while training during the previous weekend. My leader will be ok, she's just out for awhile with stitches in her left flank from another teams dog grabbing her in a pass and ripping her hide off (ouch!!!!). Although, I must say she's becoming quite accustom to life in the house. Hopefully she'll continue to heal up and be back in time for Exxon weekend. So, I had to beg for my previous leader back from Nathan's team. Lark is her name and she has done very well in lead for us for several years now. It was strange for her to be racing in the 6 dog class again after training her 20 miles. She didn't believe we were only going 6 miles til we hit the poleline coming home then she turned it on. A few short runs and she'll be good to go. The 8 dog class went pretty good. I was hoping to beat the german musher but I had one of my 5 yearlings in the team holding back a bit. She'd been training with the open team but boogered her feet up racing in the Eagle River Classic so we pulled her back to the 8 dog team. She doesn't care much for running high speeds with all 4 feet bootied. Lesson well learned! The open team is progressing quite nicely. We are very pleased with all the dogs. There are so many young ones that are looking so good that we'll have for many years to come. The plan this first year in the open class is to just do the best we can and learn as much as possible. We've been racing with different leaders at each race to make sure we have several with plenty of experience especially at the Anchorage trails which is where alot of the Rondy race is. The team finished 4th in this past weekends 14 mile race. We had Nora and Makita in lead. Nora is the mother of most of the yearlings we are racing this year. Makita and her sister Ryobi are 2 of our very best leaders. Ryobi should be in the Rondy team but pulled a groin muscle at the Orville Lake race the beginning of January and is just now able to do some short training runs. Our hope is quickly diminishing that she'll be able to make the Rondy team.
We got the rest of the pups harness broke this past weekend. We have 2 litters only about 10 days apart in age so that makes things really convenient for harness breaking them. One is out of Zeus and Nora and the other is out of Makita and our super yearling Guardrail. All the pups did really great and it will be so much fun to watch them grow.
Our newest little pup "Jingle" born in December is sure growing fast. She's 7 weeks old on the 27th. She's an only pup and definitely getting all the nutrition she needs since she weighs about 12 lbs now. She's going to stay at my mom's tomorrow while we get her mama out training. We've been taking her with us but she's getting to be a handful because she doesn't like being in the dog box for hours on end while were training all the teams.
That's it for now. Happy trails to all!